May Parker opens the door after the second knock, a half-opened letter in one hand, distracted gaze. It lands on him and she freezes, her hand slips off the doorknob.

“Yes, I know, I’m famous,” he says.

She starts to say something, then stops abruptly. Then says: “Mr. Stark, is it?”

He folds his hands together. “So famous in fact, that I probably shouldn’t hang around the hallway any longer than strictly necessary.”

She inhales. And then— smiles. She’s… very attractive. “Would you like to come in?”

He sits down on her purple pull-out sofa, atrocious color. She makes him coffee in a big heavy mug with a picture of a bee, serves him date loaf that looks like drywall and tastes as good as it looks, and doesn’t start asking any of the right questions.

“I suppose you’re wondering what I’m doing here,” Tony says, helping her along.

“Oh, yes. I suppose I am.”

“Your son applied for the September grant, and his application was approved. By moi. I’ve been emailing him but have gotten no response, which, you know, has to be some sort of technical error. So I just thought I’d swing by.” It had sounded more convincing in his head, but people are gullible, so he hopes May Parker will just nod.

Instead, she frowns, almost concerned. “He applied to your grant? Um, Tony Stark grant?”

“September grant. Probably freaked out when he realized it was me bankrolling it. Not like my picture is on the website, you know, I’m a humble man.”

Her frown smoothens out. “Probably,” she agrees. “He’ll be home any moment. Well, he should have been home but I expect he’s taking another detour to find more trash to drag back to the apartment.”

“Great,” Tony says absently.

“He’s my nephew by the way, not my son.”

“Great, great.” He sips his coffee, glances at his watch. “We have an internship retreat coming up soon, he really should come, it’ll be fantastic. All expenses paid for. No reason to say no.” He smiles his press-photo smile. The biggest one — he has three, and maybe a fourth that will do in a pinch.

“I didn’t even know he applied for any grant. And this internship, the hours…? He goes to school, you know.”

Yes. Spider-Man is, by some distance, the most interesting superhero on the scene these days. His only major flaw is that he is fourteen. But Tony will see how things go in Germany and whether he can look past that.

The front door slams and the teenager in question ambles down the hallway, all his attention on the DVD player under his arm. He drops his backpack in a corner, his keys on the table, and doesn’t see Tony until he’s already in the middle of the room. He stops dead, face melting into a look of astonishment.

“Look who’s here,” May says.

“Oh… my gosh,” Peter breathes, tugging at his headphones so they drop away from his ears.

“Mr. Parker,” Tony says. “It’s about time we met. Can we talk?”

Peter doesn’t even ask what about. “Yep,” he says, eyes shining. “Yeah, yeah, we can uh…” He points at a door.

The kid’s bedroom is the size of a shoe closet, and the only window faces the blank wall of the neighboring building. Cosy. There’s a picture of Tony himself above the bed. Signed. A real signature, not even a copy. And Tony doesn’t hand those out willy-nilly. “How much did you pay for that?” he asks, leaning in to study it with narrowed eyes. It looks like an old picture, pre-Iron-Man, even. Him standing on a stage, bright orange tie, papers in hand, head ducked awkwardly because the mic is slightly too low.

“Oh, I… don’t remember.” Peter walks up until he’s standing right next to him, all up in Tony’s personal space, hands clasped together, and looks at Tony very intently with eyes that seem too big for his face. “Are you okay?”

“Am I…?”

Peter gestures, and Tony remembers the bruises he woke up with this morning. “Oh, yes, a misunderstanding. The kind that could start a war. Which is where you come in.” He pats his breast pocket, then dives into his trouser pockets. “Quick question of the rhetorical variety—” he takes out his phone and taps twice so it barfs up a hologram: the CCTV footage of Spider-Man sweeping the legs out from under a car thief. “That’s you, right?”

“You mean like some alien punched you?” Peter asks, head cocked, worried little frown on his face as he studies Tony through the hologram.

“Kid. The footage. That is you, right?”

“Uh,” Peter goes cross-eyed glancing at the footage right in front of his nose. “Oh. Oh, yeah.” He bobs his head up and down. “I had a feeling, you know. After I got bitten and this all happened,” he gestures vaguely at himself, “I wondered if that would be how… I mean. If I’d get to meet you.” He smiles wide, unguarded.

“Who else knows? Anybody?”

Peter shakes his head vigorously. “She can’t know, Tony. Um. Mr. Stark, sir. I can’t even tell you— A lot has happened this year.”

“Sure, sure,” Tony says before the kid can start spewing out his whole life story. “Hey. You got a passport?”

-

Fine, the kid’s a little weird; babbly, far too forward with his emotions, and he has a ferocious sort of focus that he turns entirely towards Tony whenever they are in the same room.

“He keeps asking for you,” Happy says when Tony calls to check if they’ve made it to the hotel in Germany.

“Well. Tell him to stop.”

But. Fine. The kid is also staggeringly intelligent and proves himself a true asset on the battlefield. Holds his own against Captain America, takes Ant Man down.

So Tony makes it work, tells the kid he can keep the suit. He wonders how long it will take for him to start regretting that, and then immediately gets his answer when he tries to shoo Peter from the car and Peter reacts by clumsily attempting to hug him.

“I was just getting the door for you. We’re not there yet.”

“Right, sorry,” Peter says, beet-red.

He tells the kid to keep the suit, tells Happy to deal with his questions, tells FRIDAY to monitor his movements and vitals. It all goes splendidly for a few weeks, then months. He listens to all the voicemails Happy forwards, no matter how stupid they are.

…helped this old Dominican lady. She was real nice and bought me a churro. Anyway, I just think I’m ready for…

… called ‘how to make wormholes’. If you haven’t read it, you should. It’s not new, like a new book, it came out ages ago. When I was eight. Or just before, I guess …

…now, if you’re wondering how a dog got stuck up a chimney, yeah, so am I, but he was real excited and now I’m all covered in…

…discontinued sour lemon dweebs. I just think it’s a travesty. Mr. Stark, if you ever time travel, bring me sour lemon dweebs…

“I think I’m ready to be a parent, you know,” he tells Pepper one evening after listening to another five minutes of gibberish from the kid.

She just quirks an eyebrow and says, “when’s the last time you talked to that boy?” Never satisfied, that one.

He does talk to Peter, anyways. After he nearly drowns himself in a lake, chasing a lead he shouldn’t have been chasing, and Tony has to remotely save his ass all the way from India. “What were you thinking?” he hisses, ducked away behind a low garden wall, covering his earpiece with one hand.

“I’m trying to get the… the guy with the alien weapons. Have you been getting my voicemails?”

“Happy gives me the recap. I want you to stay away from that stuff, hear me?”

“But I already got so much intel on him, Mr. Stark, we could take him down.”

“There’s no  ‘we’ about it. Stick to your own stuff, kid.”

“Can we… just hang out sometime?” Peter asks tentatively.

How on earth is Tony supposed to react to that?

“Never mind,” Peter says before Tony can craft the appropriate withering response. “Uh. Another time. At some other time.”

-

When Happy forwards the eleventh voicemail in a single morning, Tony decides to give the kid a call back.

“Mr. Stark,” Peter squeaks against a background of whooshing wind, clearly mid-swing.

“Yeah, what’s up, kid?”

“Did you listen to, uh… Which voicemails did you hear?”

“None of them, give me a recap. Twenty seconds max.”

“Okay, okay, okay. I found an alien glowy thingy and I would like to say that I know for sure that it won’t blow up, but I don’t, because it really looks like it might blow up.”

“Kid. For the love of— Are you carrying it around?”

“Uuuhhh,” Peter says, like he’s really looking for a reason to say ‘no’. “Yes…?”

“Where are you?”

“Almost home. I could swing to the tower?”

“No, stop swinging that thing, put it down somewhere. I’ll meet you where you are.”

He suits up and flies out. FRIDAY has pinned Peter’s location to the roof of his apartment building in Queens, but the rooftop appears empty when he arrives.

“On your left,” FRIDAY says, and Tony turns his head to see Spider-Man’s eyes peer across a brick ledge. He hovers closer and lands.

Spider-Man has squeezed himself into the roof’s blind spot, between a raised utility structure, the parapet and the rooftop stairwell entrance. He is holding a neon-pink-glowing sphere in his cupped hands like it’s a baby bird. He pulls his mask up with one hand. There’s a bruise under his right eye, of course there is. “Heeey,” he says awkwardly.

Tony steps out of the suit and crouches next to him. “All right,” he starts in his most authoritative voice. And then say nothing else because he realizes he has no idea what to do. “How, uh… Is it heating up?”

 “Feels normal. Just. The light has been getting stronger.”

“Where did you find it?”

Peter gives a one-shouldered shrug and looks away. “Lying around.”

“Lying around places where I told you not to go?”

Peter says nothing. Tony exhales and mutters ‘teenagers’ under his breath. He holds out a hand to feel if there’s any noticeable kind of forcefield around the thing, then picks it up to have a closer look—

The rooftop lurches underneath him. Pressure like the wave of an ocean crashes through the air and for a split second everything around him is made of pure, white light.

He drops the sphere. It clanks to the flat rooftop and rolls away heavily. The sharp pink glow has turned a dull, orange one.

Silence.

The little corner of the rooftop is empty.

“Oh, Jesus,” Tony whispers. “Peter?” And then louder, head whipping around: “Peter?” Shit. “FRIDAY, I need— give me the stats from the kid’s suit.”

No response. He lifts his watch to get a look at the screen. The only thing displayed is a little exclamation mark and the words ERROR NO CONNECTION.

“FRIDAY?” he presses a button or two. Checks his phone.

ERROR NO CONNECTION.

He turns to his suit, standing motionless on the rooftop. His mouth feels dry. “FRIDAY, suit me up.”

The suit just stands there, half-open, like an iron skeleton.

He rises to his feet and takes a few unstable steps to the edge of the roof, looks down.

Cars crawl past below. People stand on the sidewalk, chatting. Someone hanging out laundry on his balcony.

All right. He didn’t accidentally erase humanity. Just… Just…

He takes off his jacket and wraps it around the glass sphere, rolling it all into a bundle that he lays in the crook of his elbow like a newborn. Peter may be trapped in there, who knows what the hell just happened.

He clatters down a metal winding staircase to the top floor of the apartment building, and then takes the elevator down to third. He reaches May’s door and rings the bell, pounds a flat hand against it, what is he doing, he doesn’t even know what to say to her.

May opens the door, barefoot, in the middle of braiding her hair. “Yes?”

“Minor setback,” Tony says. He still manages to plaster on a smile, somehow. He has smiled through worse. “Minor… Minor disappearance of a minor. But I’m sure I can get him back as soon as I get my own gadgets actually working.”

She blinks. “Sorry?”

“I… have lost Peter,” Tony says. Because that sounds all right, like the way people lose dogs, which just means they are ambling around somewhere, doesn’t mean they’ve been disintegrated or sent careening into a parallel universe…

“Not… my Peter?” she says with an awkward little laugh.

“Yes May.”

May turns away from him. “Peter?”

A shuffling sound. A four-foot-tall kid pads into the hallway; messy brown hair, impossibly large eyes behind a pair of glasses and a book about the North Pole, almost heavier than himself, tucked under his arm.

“No,” Tony says, “I meant—” and then he actually looks the kid in the face and the words die in his mouth.

The boy stops a safe distance away and frowns up at him for a stretching moment, then turns right around and plods away.

“Wrong address?” May suggests, with the gentle voice someone would use to lead a confused elderly person back into their home. “Someone I can call for you?”

Tony swallows. Swallows again. “Listen, I hate clichés,” he says. “But. What year is it?”

The boy whose eyes are so much like Peter’s returns to the hallway, holding up an Iron Man toy. He pokes May in the side with it.

“Oh,” she says. “Yes, honey, that’s…” She falters, looks at Tony again, understanding spelling out across her face. “Oooh, you are Tony Stark,” she says. She laughs and waves a hand. “Still, though. Wrong house, I’m guessing?”

Tony tightens his arm around the glass sphere. “Could I come in?”

-

All right.

So the Chitauri bomb didn’t break Peter into particles. It merely sent Tony six years back in time. Very fixable. The movies do it all the time, so Tony can certainly do it.

No reason to be worried.

May listens to his whole explanation with pursed lips, her gaze occasionally straying to Peter. The boy has curled up in an armchair and directed all his focus to the book in his lap. Tony made an executive decision not to tell her about Spider-Man, going with the intern story instead to explain how he knows them, claiming he found the glowing orb on one of his own missions.

“Do you usually pick up objects that look like they’re about to explode?” she asks.

“Do you believe me?”

“I mean. Do you need me to?”

A valid question. It’s not as if she’ll be able to help him invent time travel. “I guess it would help… erase some doubts that I may have simply gone insane.”

She hums slowly and thoughtfully. “Well. I’d argue it’s no less insane than anything else you made headlines with in the past years.”

Six years. Which means at this point in time, he has been Iron Man for only about a year.

“And your timing is good,” she says. “It just so happens you saved Peter’s life only two weeks ago, so I might be more inclined to hear you out than I would have been a month ago.”

“I did?”

“Stark Expo.”

He wraps his hands around his coffee cup and looks at Peter, his gaze keeps getting dragged back there, the most tangible evidence that this is actually happening. “He’s very quiet.”

Her face relaxes a little. “You mean he won’t be in six years?”

“Do you have… a dark room… where I can just lie down for a few minutes?”

On the floor of her bathroom, towel propped up under his head, jacket-wrapped glass sphere in the sink, he tries to make sense of his situation.

No reason to be worried.

It’s just a piece of entirely unknown technology, and he just has no access to FRIDAY or his own tower. While it seems tempting to ask his younger self for help, he knows the hypothetical risks. If he wants to have a future to return to, he needs to disrupt the timeline as little as possible. Because if his past self learns about this time travel orb now, he would never in his future make the mistake of touching it, meaning Tony wouldn’t be sent back here to show him the orb in the first place, meaning his past self wouldn’t learn about this time travel orb meaning he would touch it meaning Tony would be sent—

All right. His head is starting to hurt.

Who knows how much damage he has already caused by talking to May, by Peter seeing him.

On the other hand, how is he supposed to ever solve this thing if he can’t go anywhere, talk to anyone, gather any supplies?

It feels like a dark, heavy creature has creeped in and is settling down on his chest. This hasn’t happened to him before, even in the darkest Afghanistan cave; the feeling that the universe might have him on checkmate before he can even figure out his first move.

“I have outsmarted you a hundred times before,” he reminds the universe. “Jackass.”

He goes over his options again, step by step, discarding every idea as he goes.

The door creaks open, ajar. Tony looks up to find a man he has never seen before peer down at him. The man looks puzzled and stares at Tony for a stretching moment without saying anything.

“Yes, can I help you?” Tony asks, a bit irritated.

“My wife informed me Tony Stark was lying in our bathroom, talking to the ceiling. I suppose it was a seeing-is-believing sort of situation.”

His wife.

Tony props himself up on his elbows to study the man. “Remind me of your name?”

“Ben Parker. Do you want, ah… a glass of water or something?”

He wonders if Ben and May divorced, or maybe he died. Peter never mentioned an uncle. Or maybe he did, in one of his ten thousand voice mails, how would Tony know. “I haven’t drunk water,” he says, “since 1993. And that was only because I thought it was vodka and I accidentally took a sip.”

Ben Parker leans one arm against the doorpost. “We’re about to have dinner.”

“Well I’m time travel jet-lagged. I just had lunch.”

“…I’ll leave you to it, then.”

The door closes.

Tony rolls over and sits up, leaning his back against the wall. He stares at the toilet bowl. Going outside is a risk. But since May and Peter have seen him, that damage is done already. So if he wants to stand a chance at solving this, he is going to need an unrealistic amount of cooperation from the family behind this door. And he doesn’t like relying on other people.

He pushes himself to his feet and leaves the bathroom. He crosses the short hallway and lingers in the doorway, observing. May is wiping down the kitchen counter. Ben is setting the table for three. “Peter, wash your hands,” he says.

Peter just pulls his knees up higher so his face disappears behind the book.

Ben exhales and lays the cutlery down. He moves to Peter’s side and crouches, murmuring in the kid’s ear for a while. Peter says nothing, but eventually puts the book away and drags his feet to the kitchen, standing on tiptoes to reach the soap by the faucet.

Ben turns and spots Tony. “Changed your mind?”

“Just thought it was time to open negotiations.”

Ben exchanges a look with May.

“It’s simple, really,” Tony says. “I can only travel back to the future if there is a future to travel back to, which means I have to disrupt the space-time continuum as little as possible. Can’t just go galivanting around, doing whatever. I need to lie low, and preferably, here.”

May and Ben stare at him.

“I’ll need to study time travel, obviously. Any books you can get me. And a few, uh… Well, a microscope, probably. Possibly some other things. Maybe you have a spare office I can work from. Ideally with a lab, but I can make do.”

May and Ben stare at him.

Peter has finished washing his hands and patters away from them, through a doorway in the corner. Neither Ben nor May seem to notice.

“I can pay you back in six years,” Tony says. And tries a smile.

“Let’s start by sitting down,” May says.

Peter re-enters the room with a new book. He walks up to Tony and holds it out with both hands. The time traveler’s apprentice by Melody Tandia.

“Oh, thanks kid,” Tony says, taking it from him. “That’s a start. Have you read it?”

Peter just nods and walks off, he pulls out a chair at the table and sits, looking at them with no small amount of impatience. Tony wants to ask Have you noticed this kid doesn’t talk? But decides to assume that they, in fact, have noticed.

He takes the chair that doesn’t have a plate in front of it, on Peter’s right. He lays the book down.

Ben and May sit too, their expressions carefully blank. Ben serves Peter food, “there you go, hon,” some tuna, a scoop of mashed potatoes and a large pile of peas. May and Ben fill a plate, too, exchanging more looks as they go. May smirks a little, Ben narrows his eyes at her.

“All right, Mr. Stark,” May says, picking up her fork. She starts mixing the peas with the mashed potatoes. “Are we to understand that you are requesting to stay inside this apartment until you have… invented time travel?”

“Correct.”

“And how long will that take?”

“Absolutely no way to tell.”

Peter has taken a big spoonful of mashed potatoes, but is only nibbling at it, his teeth scraping against the metal spoon with each tiny bite.

“Are you aware that this is a rather large ask?”

“I’m a time refugee, stranded in the past,” Tony says. “If I had other options, I would take them. I’m not exactly thrilled about any of this.”

“You want to sleep on our couch for the rest of eternity?” Ben scathes.

“Well. A spare bedroom would be good.”

“We don’t have a spare bedroom. Or a spare office. We don’t have that kind of room, physically or mentally, we just had our traumatized nephew move in.”

“Ben,” May says, warningly.

Ben glances at Peter. The kid gives absolutely no indication that he is listening. He is drawing a grid into his pile of mashed potatoes with his fork.

“Can you give me a week?” Tony says.

“You want to invent time travel in a week?”

“I don’t technically need to invent it. I just need to study a piece of alien technology and harness its powers.”

“Where is this alien technology?”

“In your bathroom sink.”

May and Ben look at each other. For a while. May shrugs. Ben rolls his eyes.

Tony looks away from them, thumbs through the book, studies the blurb, looks at Peter. “Looks like this Amosemus guy uses a magical wardrobe to travel through time. My time travel is likely not based on magic but technology. Which is good, because technology can be understood. Unfortunately it’s alien technology, which somewhat complicates matters.”

Peter is looking up at him, spoon in his mouth, eyebrows dipped down in a look of puzzled interest.

“If you finish those peas, I’ll tell you how gravitational fields dilate time.”

Peter seems to weigh that proposal for a moment, and then starts scooping up peas.

“You’re good with kids,” May observes.

“No I’m not,” Tony says, deeply offended.

May gives him a very long, deliberative look. “A week is manageable,” she says.

Ben says nothing.

“Great.” Tony claps his hands together. “First things first. My suit is still on the roof.”

-

May and Ben help him carry it down the stairs, lug it into the elevator, a bedsheet wrapped around it.

“So the kid,” Tony says as the elevator descends, “is eight?”

May hooks one arm around the Iron Suit to keep it from tilting against the elevator buttons. “He is. But if he seems younger, yes, he has regressed a little bit. With his parents, you know.”

Tony wouldn’t know if the kid seems younger, he didn’t get a doctorate in eight-year-olds. “His parents.”

“It has only been two months.”

Dead, then, probably. Tony should have deduced as much when he first met the kid, him living with his aunt. But he had priorities.

Has priorities.

“He has barely spoken since it happened,” May says. “But doctors say it will all… work itself out.”

“It will,” Tony says. He never heard fourteen-year-old Peter talk about his parents, so he probably gets over it just splendidly.

May smiles, tentatively hopeful and with a gratitude that, for some reason, seems directed right at him.

They put the Iron Suit in the hallway. And then May sets Tony up with her old laptop while Ben puts Peter to bed — though he comes back out after a few minutes and looks at Tony. “You promised him a bedtime story.”

“What?”

“He’s quite insistent.”

So Tony goes into the bedroom where Peter is sitting with his arms crossed and the Iron Man toy perched on his knee. And talks about gravitational time dilation until Peter’s eyes have drifted shut.

He taps his fingers against his knee, studying the kid’s face a moment longer. “At least you listen to me. Would have done future you a lot of good, too.”

-

He stays up all night, browsing the web, desperately missing FRIDAY. He unwraps the ball and studies it from every angle without touching it. It might be human touch that activates it somehow, since Peter was wearing the suit as he carried it around but Tony just plucked it up with his bare hands. And it’s notable that his Iron suit time-travelled along with him, there must have been some sort of interference between the two technologies. That gives him two clues to work with.

Three, really. Because Peter had been sticking his nose into Chitauri technology, and it’s pretty obvious that wormholes are the Chitauri’s preferred mode of transportation. And earth’s theoretical physicists have long debated that wormholes could create the conditions for time travel.

Plenty to work with, but it’s all gonna have to come from this, this stupid, orange-glowing oversized marble.

It’s not as perfectly spherical as he thought. When the light hits it in the right way, he spots a seam, and then another. This thing opens up.

That’s good. That’s… familiar.

Plenty to work with.

-

When May first enters the room a little after six AM, he has a pile of notes and a wish list. “I need a harmonic balancer puller,” he informs her. “And a micrometer. And… And…” He rifles through the papers.

“Clean underwear?” May suggests.

Tony blinks at her. “I suppose that would be useful.”

“Coffee?” she continues, her eyes sparkling a little. She apparently sees the humor in the situation — Well, because she barely understands the situation, or the delicacy of their space-time continuum.

But she promised him coffee, so he decides not to be snide about it.

She potters around the kitchen, turns on the waffle maker. “Mr. Stark,” she says earnestly. “I am willing to help you. Very willing. But please be aware that we are financially stretched pretty thin at the moment.”

“Right, right,” Tony says. He did actually think about that. He has credit cards linked to a bank account that doesn’t exist yet. A watch that is theoretically worth a fortune, but practically worthless without a connection to FRIDAY. “I’ll work on that. I’ll think of something. I will.”

She sighs and holds out a hand, wriggling her fingers. “Let’s see that list, then.”

Peter shuffles into the room, glasses askew and hair standing up like exponential growth curves. Tony hastily packs everything away in the box May gave him. A good thing too, because Peter ignores the waffles on the table and makes a beeline for him, crouching on the carpet. He turns his unwavering stare on Tony and points at the pile of notes still on the coffee table.

Tony slides them away. “No, kiddo. Because in my past, which is your future, you didn’t know about any of this so you can’t know. It could break the space-time continuum. So, uh—” he wafts a hand. “Shoo.”

Peter leans his chin in his hand and does not look away from him.

“How do I make him go away?”

“Pete, come have your waffles,” May says. “We’re going to be late.”

Peter glances her way. And says in a very clear voice: “I want to stay with Iron Man.”

May grips the back of a chair, but her voice betrays no surprise when she calmly responds: “You have school, hon.”

Peter pulls a face.

“Iron Man will still be here when you get back,” May says. “He’ll be here a while.” Which is frankly a bit of an insult to Tony’s intellectual capabilities, but seems to mollify Peter, who chews his bottom lip, but then gets to his feet and retreats to the table.

“What’s… your usual breakfast?” May asks Tony.

“I’ll take anything.”

He gets heart-shaped waffles with a smiley face made out of banana slices.

He observes them from a distance, this family. The fond expression on May’s face as she attempts to flatten Peter’s hair back down. She pours him orange juice. Presses a kiss to his cheek.

Studying alien technology feels more familiar than any of this.

Ben gets up too, as May and Peter are about to leave. He ruffles Peter’s hair and then stares at Tony for a while, as if he needs to reprogram his brain into accepting that yes, this man is staying in his apartment now. Then he shoves a protein bar into his mouth, throws a banana into a backpack and says, mouth full and vaguely waving a hand, “Uh, if you get hungry today, help yourself.” And leaves, too.

-

In the past, which is technically the future, Tony could get what he needed at the snap of a finger.

In the present, which is technically the past, he suddenly depends on a lagging old laptop and two people with full-time jobs. Over the next few days, he learns that Ben is a fire fighter, May an operating room nurse, meaning they both have wildly irregular schedules.

He waits for May to get the tools out of their storage, to get him the harmonic balancer puller and the micrometer. He waits for Ben to get him a whole stack of books from the library.

He puts a picture of his sneakers and sunglasses on Craigslist. Not even on the shelves yet, he writes, which is extremely true. Two separate buyers come by during the week to pick them up, pushing cash into May’s hands.

“Great,” Tony says, sitting on the couch and wriggling his socked feet. “Because I really need a precision screwdriver set and a loupe.”

May does the shopping. Ben takes care of dinner, which seems fair enough, considering Tony’s limited experience with May’s cooking. They take turns dropping Peter off at school and picking him up.

They have many whispered conversations in the kitchen, but they seem to be about their nephew far more than about anything else. Clearly, the biggest upheaval in their life, these days, isn’t Tony moving in, but Peter.

Peter, who — from what Tony understands — hasn’t spoken since the plane crash. Peter, who for the past few days has refused to go to sleep without getting a bedtime from Tony about quantum mechanics.

In the past, which is technically the future, Peter was bright-eyed and breezy, bouncy, chirpy, borderline impertinent.

In the present, which is technically the past, Peter scurries around the apartment, quiet as a mouse. He likes waffles, and reading about animals, and staring at Tony for lengthy periods of time.

Tony doesn’t prefer the other version of Peter perse, as he keeps telling himself, but he is somehow also itching to try and coax that other version out with the only tool he has at his disposal: tales about time travel. “So that’s how the five-vertex polyhedral can be a basic model for our understanding of how time could fold in on itself,” he explains as he finishes the schematic drawing, “until future and past are pressed together.”

Peter looks at him and looks at the drawing and doesn’t say anything, but spends the rest of the evening drawing five-vertex polyhedrals on the back of an envelope.

-

When the week draws to a close, Tony has a crick in his back from sleeping on the sofa, seven-and-a-half potential theories, and one rough sketch of the inside of the Chitauri sphere based on what he can see through the murky, orange glow. He hasn’t been able to open the thing up, yet. He suspects he is gonna need a specific cannon pinion remover that doesn’t come cheaply and he’s tired of asking for favors. May and Ben have not yet pointed out that the promised deadline is coming up, but Tony can feel it hanging over him like a slowly descending pendulum blade.

He dreams, about a black hole sucking him in. He tries to claw his way out but everything is heavy, so heavy, he is carrying a nuclear bomb and it’s about to explode over New York, he hears the ping of incoming emails, Pepper reminding him to eat breakfast, Peter’s voicemails.

…discontinued sour lemon dweebs. I just think it’s a travesty. Mr. Stark, if you ever time travel, bring me sour lemon dweebs…

He holds on to Pepper until she slips away, the black hole sucks her in.

…if you ever time travel…

He tries to push the nuclear bomb through a wormhole but it bounces away like a pinball and he watches it explode over the city.

… bring me sour lemon dweebs…

He wakes up heaving in a breath, sun bright on his face, blanket soaked in sweat. He kicks it away and stands, stumbling to the kitchen where he holds his head under the running tap until he remembers where he is. When he is.

He glances at the clock. Four PM. He stayed up all night again and fell asleep at some point in the afternoon, as has become his habit.

He roughly scrubs at his face with a tea towel and goes looking for his phone. He hasn’t used it in a week, there’s hardly any point. But he goes through the voicemails Happy forwarded him, tries to remember the date and taps the play button on a first one. Listens to some nonsense about churros for a while before moving on to another.

Hey, Happy and Mr. Stark! Um, here’s my report for tonight. I pickpocketed a pickpocket. Pickpocket-ception, am I right? Helped put out a fire in a candy store, so they gave me lots of gummibears. A bit bummed out because turns out the, the whoever’s in charge discontinued sour lemon dweebs. I just think it’s a travesty. Mr. Stark, if you ever time travel, bring me sour lemon dweebs, it’s the only flavor I like. Um, what else—

It’s… stupid. It’s probably nothing. A time travel joke. Just the kind of thing Peter would say. With how much the kid talks, he probably made jokes about every field of scientific research imaginable.

But what if it’s more than that? What if Peter knew all this would happen? When he met May and Peter, recruiting Peter for Germany, had they in fact met him before in their past? Though if they had, wouldn’t they have said something? …Well no, they shouldn’t because everything would need to happen the way it had already happened, because if they warned Tony, then Tony wouldn’t go back in time and wouldn’t meet them in the past, and they wouldn’t know to warn Tony so he would go back in time and—

His head is hurting again.

And he’s probably reading way too much into it. Putting far too much meaning into a teenager asking for candy.

The front door slams, a murmured voice. Tony swiftly returns to the couch to wrap the Chitauri sphere back up in its designated towel and pack it away in the box.

Peter enters the room first, hugging his backpack to his chest. He moves straight to Tony’s side to peer down at his notes.

“Nu-uh,” Tony says, quickly piling them all together. “You know the rules, kiddo.”

He glances up when May steps into the room, too. She is holding a transparent pocket folder with papers. “Grab some fruit, Pete,” she says, wiping hair out of her eyes. She looks exhausted. Tony doesn’t remember seeing her at breakfast so she probably pulled a double shift.

She sits on the other end of the couch. “Listen,” she says, looking a little awkward. “I had an idea, but you can say no if you think it’s weird.” She waves with the pile of papers. “I printed out some pictures of you. You can sign them. I’ve seen signed pictures of you go for as much as five hundred dollars online. To get some money for that, the… cannon pin thing you need.”

“You are brilliant,” Tony says. “Give me those.”

She lays the papers down in front of him. Printed pictures of Tony standing on a stage, bright orange tie, papers in hand, head ducked awkwardly because the mic is slightly too low.

His heart slams into overdrive.

“Coffee?” May asks, and then frowns and says: “You all right?”

This picture, with his autograph, is going to hang on Peter’s wall. And when the kid is fourteen, Tony will show up on his doorstep and see it. That Tony won’t know Peter, but Peter will know him. Peter will know that at some point, that Tony will time travel back to the past. And Peter will never say a thing, apart from requesting Sour Lemon Dweebs. Everything is happening the way it already happened.

Which also means that Tony solved it. No matter how long it may have taken.

He can’t put it into words, what it all means. So he slides the pictures closer. “Got a pen?”

She goes looking for one and when she returns, she says, “Ben and I both have weekend shifts. We’re dropping Peter off at a neighbor. We’ve told him not to talk about you, and I think he understands, but it’s hard to know what’s going on inside that little brain.”

Tony nods. “Yeah, it’ll be… fine.” But after she has moved away to join Peter at the kitchen table, he adds: “Listen, I can pitch in.”

She quirks an eyebrow.

“I’m gonna… I’m not gonna be out of here by the end of the week.”

“We figured.”

“I understand that I’m asking a lot from you. I do. So I can pitch in. I can… I don’t know, do dishes. And I can look after the kid if you need me to.”

She hums, her fingers combing through Peter’s hair. “Pete, do you want to stay with Mr. Okezie for the weekend, or with Tony?”

The kid smiles broadly and points. “Tony!”

-

So Tony spends his Saturday making eggs on toast, and building a multicolored submarine out of Lego. “The submarine can travel in time,” Peter says as he clicks a little hat onto a little head, “like a TARDIS submarine.” That’s his third sentence today, he’s feeling chatty.

“I may have doomed you to be obsessed with time travel for the rest of your childhood,” Tony muses.

He doesn’t touch his research all day, but he’s feeling remarkably calm about it. He will solve this, and it will happen when it’s supposed to. Control is an illusion, anyway.

He puts the signed pictures on Craigslist, vacuums the apartment and has dinner ready when May and Ben get home.

“You made a submarine!” Ben says, crouching next to it, laying one hand on Peter’sback. “So many colors.”

“Because it travels at the speed of light,” Peter says. “And then the temp—temporal light dispersion is a side effect of the time travel.”

“Makes sense,” Ben says, and sends Tony a smile for the first time.

-

It’s well into the second week when, after many more heart-shaped waffles and bedtime stories, after four signed pictures sold and a contribution from May and Ben, he can order the tools he needs to finally open the Chitauri sphere up.

He gets to work on it while Peter is at school and Ben and May at work. He cracks the sphere open along the seams in a very satisfying way, revealing an interior mechanism that most reminds him of the inside of a pendulum clock, interlocking rotating parts and tiny weights. And at the very core of it all, a long cylindrical tube glowing orange.

He is so close now, this has to be it. Two days, maybe three. His Eureka moment is coming.

-

Time is a funny thing.

It keeps moving, and seemingly in only one direction. And sometimes you remember a moment a certain way, but as it gets further away, you start doubting.

How Peter remembers it is:

When he is eight, it feels like time is standing still for a while, because mom and dad die and the bottom falls out of his life, nothing makes sense anymore. He still has to sleep and eat and brush his teeth even though his days are just one big mush and nothing seems to be going in the right order. May and Ben take him to the zoo, the Stark expo, the planetarium. Mush, mush, mush. He has a different bedroom and a different classroom, and he’s just waiting for time to become normal again, and his parents to come back.

Time doesn’t become normaller. It becomes weirder. Because Iron Man turns up on their doorstep, and then starts living in a corner of their house. Like a poltergeist. He snores when he sleeps. And he writes lots and lots and lots and lots of numbers on papers, and those papers get scattered around the whole apartment. He always hides his stuff away in boxes like he thinks Peter will steal it. But he tells good bedtime stories, about how time can loop around itself like a paperclip, which means mom and dad in a way are not dead at all.

Tony gets a fixed place at the table and his own mug, the one with a picture of a bee, and they all start using the Iron Suit as a coat rack.

He remembers Tony selling his shoes to pay for a micrometer. Folding signed pictures into envelopes to pay for some very, very specific cannon pinning remover. He remembers helping Tony address them.

“Did we actually do that?” he asked May once, years later. “Did I make that up, or did we start a business in signed Tony Stark pictures?”

“We actually did that.”

“What did he need the tools for?”

“I shouldn’t tell you,” she said. Because that became the rule after Tony left. Everything needs to happen the way it already happened, so the less you know, the better.

He remembers Tony’s giddiness when the tools arrived. Fleeting memories of waking up at night and seeing him through the gap in the doorway, by the light of a table lamp, using the loupe to inspect tiny, circular objects that must have come from— something that had smashed him back in time in the first place. Peter always imagines that something as clock-shaped, with lots of buttons and dials.

Weekends together, Tony barefoot, making him pancakes or omelets. Building stuff out of Lego. Peter got into chess at some point, so Tony got into it too. Tony started picking Peter up from school when Ben and May had to work, wearing Ben’s big coat and waving through a gap in the car window, because no one was supposed to see him. They bought a purple sofa that pulled out, so Tony could sleep without walking around all crooked afterwards. He accumulated more and more tools and appliances in his little corner, allowed Peter to try them all out, but never allowed him to peek inside that cardboard box.

One evening, after a bedtime story about time paradoxes, Peter remembers whispering to him: “Do you think I can go back one day and see, see mom and dad again?”

“If there’s anything I learned from all this,” Tony said, “it’s that we cannot change the past. Everything will always happen the way it has happened. That’s why aliens are clever, you see. They never used this technology to travel through time, only through space.”

“But can I go back and see mom and dad again, though?”

And Tony exhaled really long and said, “kiddo, can I give you a hug?”

Which wasn’t a ‘yes’, but it was still a nice moment.

In his memory, this period in his life feels like it stretched out for ages, like Tony celebrated at least two birthdays and one Christmas with them. He knows in reality, it took Tony roughly three months to figure the whole thing out.

“Are you worried?” he had asked once, one arm curled around Tony’s knee, they were watching Back to the Future together.

Tony just shook his head, raking a hand through Peter’s hair. “Everything is gonna happen the way it’s supposed to.”

He does remember, with vivid clarity, the moment Tony got his breakthrough.

-

The worst part of being famous and stuck in the past is that he can’t go outside and take Peter to an adventure park or the aquarium or something. When it’s a sunny afternoon, all Tony can do is stay inside with the kid. He teaches Peter to take the dishwasher apart and put it back together, they do the same thing with the vacuum cleaner. The kid learns at lightning speed. “When you’re older and I’m back in the future,” he says, “I’m gonna show you around my workshop, you’ll have a field day.”

His own progress has been steady but slow. Every single thing he learns about Chitauri technology is fascinating but throws up a myriad of new questions. He can’t wait to have this thing back in his workshop and study it there. Although he realizes, as he watches Peter click the dust cover of the vacuum cleaner back in place, that he’ll have to miss out on six years of this kid growing up.

 “Hey,” he says. “Listen. When you meet me again I’m gonna… I might be an asshole for a little bit, okay? Be patient with me.”

“Okay,” Peter says slowly. “Can you just not be?”

Tony shakes his head. “It has already happened.”

He thinks of future Peter asking, tentatively, can we just hang out, and curses himself. He thinks of the voicemails piling up over the period of several months.

After Peter has gone to bed that evening, Tony sits on his couch and plugs in his headphones, scrolls through the voicemail messages Happy forwarded. As if listening to them retroactively will somehow fix everything. He lays his head back and listens to Peter talk about helping stranded tourists, saving dogs from chimneys, replacing car tires. He taps voicemail number seventeen.

Hi Happy, Hi Mr. Stark. Um. Pretty quiet day today. Think I’m heading home early. I got homework, you know. I’ve been reading, uh… Mr. Stark, I’ve been reading a book from Dr. Bezruk, that’s B-E-Z-R-U-K called ‘how to make wormholes’. If you haven’t read it, you should.

Tony lifts his head, all other thoughts disappearing, all his focus zeroing in on Peter’s words.

It’s not new, like a new book, it came out ages ago. When I was eight. Or just before, I guess. Anyway I’m… gonna go do that. Read that. Uh. Ready for a new mission anytime.

“Oh, you brilliant kid,” Tony whispers.

He sits up, pulls the headphones out. He fires up May’s old laptop, looks for the book. Dr. Bezruk, a little-known Ukrainian scientist from Sevastopol university, published it less than a year ago. All the reviews are unfavorable, calling her work ‘baseless’ and ‘science-fiction with an emphasis on fiction’. Sounds right up his alley.

This absolutely genius kid, leaving him clues this way.

He looks through the library collection. It’s not there, so he has to order the book, express delivery. It’s expensive, too, but he has sold enough signed pictures lately.

He closes the laptop. Wipes a hand down his face. And then goes outside to the balcony where May and Ben are having a glass of wine together. They nod at him.

These people and the insanity they are willing to put up with… Not even once have they lost their temper about Tony taking up half their living room and being there all. the. freaking. time.

“I have an unusual request,” he says. “Could one of you buy me some Sour Lemon Dweebs this week?”

Ben snorts. “Three months of this. And that constitutes an unusual request?”

“Fair enough.”

“Sour Lemon Dweebs,” Ben repeats, taking out his phone and making a note.

“Wine?” May asks him.

Tony sits down with them. “Guys. I know this has been hard. Please take my fan-picture money and get a hotel room for a night, something with a pool and a sauna and excellent room service and a lot of breathing room... I can watch the kid.” He won’t get much more time with eight-year-old Peter, anyway. He wants to make it count.

-

He makes lasagna, lets Peter have far too much ice cream for dessert, lets him stay up way too late.

“You solved it, didn’t you?” Peter says, when half-way through the second movie Tony breaks out the popcorn.

“I… think I’m close,” Tony admits.

“Are you gonna leave?”

“At some point. But I’ll see you again.”

Peter pulls his legs up and sits sideways on the couch to look at him. “Can I call you on the phone while you’re gone?”

“No kiddo. You’re going to have to wait a while.”

“How long?”

“Sometimes it will feel like really long,” Tony says. “And sometimes it will seem like time flies. That’s how time works.”

-

May brings Sour Lemon Dweebs back with her next grocery trip. The book arrives two days later. Ben brings it up with the rest of the mail.

It’s another all-nighter, it’s everything coming together, all his notes and sketches about Chitauri technology. How, in accordance with Bezruk’s theories, it could have interplayed with the technology of his Iron suit, the field resonance, the artificial gravity feedback. And all that coming to a blow with a final element added: the touch of his bare hands which closed microscopic ionic circuits and likely turned his entire body into an antenna.

Conclusion: the Chitauri sphere is still in suspension, and Tony and his suit are, too. They are all being held in place, six years in the past, by the pressure of exotic matter. All he has to do, by his newest calculations, is shut the sphere off. Even just taking it apart, breaking it, would do the trick. He would be instantly sucked back into his present.

Or it could kill him, of course. But when has that ever stopped him?

In case something goes wrong, he decides to do it back on the rooftop and while Peter is at school.

“When you meet me again,” he tells May, “which is in my past but your future, I’m not going to remember any of this. But since it has already happened, it needs to happen in your future the way it happened in my past.”

“Yes, I understand.”

“It is of vital importance that none you ever tell me anything and let things happen the way they are supposed to. Except for one thing.” He crouches in front of Peter and holds up Bezruk’s book. “Look, kiddo. This helped me solve it all.” He tucks it under Peter’s arm, squeezes his shoulder. “I need to you hold on to this, keep it very safe until you meet me again, and when you think the time is right, give me a clue. Can you do that for me, partner in crime?”

Peter hugs the book to his chest and nods, lips trembling.

“I’m very proud of you,” Tony says. “When we meet again, it might not feel that way for a while, but I am.”

Once they are gone, he cleans his corner of the apartment. He takes the coats off the Iron Suit and drags it back up to the roof. That alone takes half an hour. He gets a screwdriver and the sphere from the cardboard box, stuffs his pockets full of Sour Lemon Dweebs. Goes back upstairs.

He lays the sphere down on the roof and pries it open. Observes the glowing core.

Here goes nothing.

He presses the tip of the screwdriver against it and puts the pressure of his entire bodyweight onto it until he hears a crack.

The rooftop lurches underneath him. The entire universe folds over him and for a split second everything goes pitch black. And then the city slams down all around him. The screwdriver is still in his hand. The cracked open sphere lies next to his knee, a carcass of metal and dull glass.

He looks up.

Peter, fourteen-year-old-Peter, Spider-Man-Peter, lowers the hand he had thrown up in front of his face. They stare at each other for the space of a few heartbeats, Peter’s eyes travel down Ben’s shirt, the sweatpants, the socked feet, he looks puzzled and then—

“Oh—Oh my god,” Peter breathes, sitting up. “Was that… Was that the thing? Did the thing just happen?”

In response, Tony spreads his arms.

Peter’s eyes widen slightly, and then something cracks in his face and he scoots closer, falls forward into Tony’s hug.

Tony pulls him closer. “Look how much you’ve grown,” he says.

Peter laughs and then starts sniffling.

“Oh, kiddo.”

“I missed you.”

“You did so well. I’m so proud of you.”

“I worried you wouldn’t hear my clue.”

“I heard. I heard you. Kid, I’m never going to miss another voicemail from you. I want to hear every single thought rattling around in that brain of yours.” He wants to talk about chess and wormholes and uncle Ben, teach Peter to take apart an arc reactor or a hoverboard, take him to an adventure park and the aquarium. All of that is going to happen. The way it is supposed to.

“So, uh… where are my Sour Lemon Dweebs?” Peter asks.